"Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth: for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak: and He will shew you things to come."

               -John 16:13

Charles Spurgeon once said that discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong; rather, it is being able to tell the difference between right and almost right. Just as our adversary the devil masquerades as an “angel of light”  hoping to deceive whom he may (II Corinthians 11:14), so his schemes are often very aptly disguised and it takes a heart and soul saturated with the Holy Ghost and God’s Word to discover the lies which are hidden beneath the surface. It took less than 50 words to trick Eve into taking forbidden fruit, and it was all because she failed to look any further than the few grains of truth scattered about the surface what Satan was telling her (Genesis 3:1-5).

As James reminded us in his epistle, “whosoever shall keep the whole Law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” (2:10) In other words, you have to walk in the whole truth or you’re not walking in truth at all. If we add to it, we implicate its insufficiency apart from us (Proverbs 30:6); if we diminish from it, we suggest that what God gave us is inaccurate and flawed (Deuteronomy 12:32).

“I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth.”

               -I John 2:21

The truth cannot be changed. It is “forever settled in heaven”, and must be either accepted or rejected by all who hear it (Psalm 119:89; John 17:17). Trying to find a comfortable middle-ground between both righteousness and selfishness is like trying to reconcile the east and west: if you try to go both ways at the same time you’ll end up getting nowhere at all.